The present invention relates to a computer-based system and a computer program product for collaborative editing of documents. Specifically, the present invention relates to a computer-based system for collaborative editing of documents, the computer-based system comprising a computer-based control module and a plurality of computerized workstations connected to the control module via communication channels, the control module being based on a computer having one or more processors controlled by the computer program product.
Conventionally, computer-based systems for editing of documents comprise one or more computerized workstations connected via communication channels to a file server. The computerized workstations, typically personal computers, run an editing program, either locally or on an application server, for editing a document selected and loaded from the file server. In collaborative editing more than one user edit concurrently the same document. In known systems for collaborative editing of documents, changes to the documents and the positions of the changes are communicated from the workstation where the change has been initiated to all the other workstations that have loaded and opened the same document file. Such a system for collaborative editing has been described by Sun., C., Jia, X., Zhang, Y., and Yang, Y.: “REDUCE: a prototypical cooperative editing system”, in Proceedings of the Human-Computer Interaction, 1997, pages 89-92. The system described by Sun., C., Jia, X., Zhang, Y., and Yang, Y makes possible collaborative editing of document files via the Internet. While the known systems for collaborative editing of documents make possible concurrent editing of document files by multiple users, security and access control mechanisms always apply to the whole document file. In other words, in the known systems for collaborative editing, all the participating users have the same access rights for the whole document file. The known systems for collaborative editing of documents make possible simultaneous editing of a document file but fail to provide control over who edited what part of the document, how the document was created or from where document parts were copied.